We’ve chosen the winner for the Atlas for Africa competition

Jackie Bischof
Quartz
Published in
3 min readJan 1, 2018

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We’re pleased to announce the winner of Quartz’s Atlas for Africa competition is Blaise Aboh from Nigeria.

Over the last year, Quartz Africa has trained hundreds of journalists in half a dozen countries on how to use our free chartbuilder Atlas, with the generous support of a Code for Africa grant. Blaise has been one of the most enthusiastic users of Atlas since he started using it in May 2017, creating numerous charts tracking trends in Nigeria from HIV prevalence to internet browsing habits. He has also trained journalists and university students in Lagos and Abuja on how to use Atlas through his work as a Code for Africa innovation fellow, and 65 stories have been published with Atlas for Africa charts included.

Blaise is pictured during one of his Atlas training sessions.

Blaise’s enthusiastic use of Atlas to create more Africa-focused data visualizations, and his interest in teaching others how to use the tool, were exactly what we hoped would be the outcome of our initiative.

Blaise is the founder of Orodata Science, a civic technology organization that studies and leverages data-driven science, methods, processes, and systems in order to provide insights that support transparency, accountability, citizen engagement and informed decision making. Orodata also enables governments at the federal, state, and local levels to improve their capacity to communicate reform initiatives, actions, policies, and programs using simple visual language for stakeholders and citizens.

Blaise during a training session.

Blaise wins a ten-day, nine-night trip to New York City to visit Quartz’s offices, and to Washington, D.C. to visit ICFJ’s offices. There, he will meet with journalists similarly obsessed with data visualization and participate in some training.

Blaise says he hopes the trip will afford him “knowledge on new environments, different newsroom structures, and even advanced journalism practices. Upon returning to Nigeria, I will begin to re-equip Nigerian newsrooms and journalists with the same knowledge, so they can become better reporters and write better stories, and make more impact.”

Follow Blaise on Medium and on Twitter.

This blog post is part of a series written for Atlas for Africa, an initiative to bring Quartz’s chart-building platform, Atlas, to newsrooms and organizations across Africa for free, in support of greater access to Africa-focused data sources and visualization. Interested in a training session with the Atlas for Africa team? Email atlasforafrica@qz.com. Atlas for Africa is supported by Code for Africa’sinnovateAFRICA fund and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

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Deputy Editor @qz, formerly @Newsweek, @WSJNY, and @Reuters. Proud Jo’burger and New Yorker. Often found confusing Americans with classic South African slang.